Coldplay
Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends
Parlophone, out Thursday [June 12]
FOUR STARS


Four years ago, when their third album was overdue, Coldplay had a crisis. They had apparently recorded 60 songs, some of them quite experimental; it was rumoured that they had ditched their soft-rock anthems, gone electronic and started resembling Kraftwerk and Brian Eno. And then they shelved the lot. When EMI, which owns Parlophone, announced that the album was being delayed, its share price, already ailing, fell further.

Chris Martin and the other members of Coldplay went back into the studio and came up with a record that wasn’t experimental at all: X&Y, which contained one sample from Kraftwerk and no trace of Eno. Martin lashed out at shareholders, saying they were ‘the great evil of this modern world’, but he didn’t let them down. The album sold 10m copies.

Martin, who is one of rock’s great agonisers, still wasn’t happy. Three years on, Coldplay have finally found their way off the beaten track. On their fourth album, Eno isn’t merely present as an influence: he is the producer. And Martin has made the album he wanted to make last time.

The difference starts with the title, as the snappiness of X&Y gives way to Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends: not one difficult title, but two. They might as well have called the album Stuff The Marketing Department.

When Eno works with U2, he tends to act as an editor rather than a soundscaper, and he seems to have played a similar role here. My guess is that he drummed a home truth into Coldplay’s heads: that they could afford to make the music a lot more difficult, because they nearly always deliver a big stadium chorus.

The arrangements on Viva Etc Etc are formidably disparate. There are pounding instrumentals, Irish-style folk songs, crooned lullabies, angsty blues-rockers, lavish strings, a few middle-Eastern touches, and a track that largely consists of a church organ and some handclaps.

The album title isn’t the only double-decker. You wait ages for a complicated Coldplay song, then ten come along at once. Three of the ten are actually two tracks each: Lovers In Japan/Reign Of Love, Yes/Chinese Sleep Chant, and Death And All His Friends/The Escapist. It’s not clear whether they are jammed together so as to maintain the theme of a dual personality, or to save the fans some money on iTunes.

All this may sound off-putting, but there is one big redeeming feature to prevent EMI’s new bosses from jumping off a ledge: the tunes, which are as sweet as ever. It’s like going for breakfast in your local cafe to find they are serving some exotic new foreign bread – but still with Gales’ honey on top.

Give Martin a pen and he will come up with a lyric that is quite obtuse. ‘God is in the houses,’ he confides at one point, ‘and God is in my head.’ Later he adds: ‘Soldiers you’ve got to soldier on / Sometimes even the right is wrong’. When he sings ‘Away get carried on a reign of love’, he begins like Yoda to sound, and for his sanity you fear.

Take the pen away, however, and he comes up with something catchy. He is particularly good at singing without words, and here he delivers a rousing lala-lala-lala-lalaiy, a resounding ohohohoh-ohohohoh-oh and a killer ah-ah-ah-ah-iiiiii. They’re all lovingly recorded on the lyric sheet, and they will all be echoing round the arenas when Coldplay tour in December.

Martin’s choruses remain strong and simple, and as on the last album they carry traces of the hymn book he would have had in his days at public school. Reign Of Love, a gorgeously gentle piano ballad, has the churchiest chords since the last days of Johnny Cash.

The music doesn’t always live up to its own ambitions. A track called 42 aspires to be the Beatles but ends up more like Wings, as it abruptly turns from a lullaby into a frenetically stolid rocker. But you have to hand it to Coldplay. They have pulled off the trick of changing their sound – several times over – while remaining recognisably themselves. This is a much bolder record than X&Y, and a slightly better one. It should keep EMI in business for a little longer.

If you like this, why not try…
Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now by Mitch Benn (Laughing Stock, on iTunes). Sly parody that sounds more like Coldplay than they themselves do now